arXiv:2506.13803cs.AIcs.LG2025-06被引 3

让机器学习借鉴人类因果思维,提升泛化与可解释性。

Causality in the human niche: lessons for machine learning

  • 从人类认知出发,构建更贴近真实世界的因果推理机制。
  • 指出传统因果模型在类比迁移上的不足,强调类型相似性的重要性。
  • 适合研究可解释AI、具身智能与认知启发式模型的学者参考。

人类以因果关系理解世界,并通过因果语言进行交流。这种因果认知被认为是人类高效泛化和学习新领域能力的基础,而当前机器学习系统在此方面表现较弱。将类似人类的因果能力融入机器学习,有助于构建更有效且可解释的人工智能。尽管机器学习界已引入结构因果模型(SCM)框架,其在形式化因果关系上取得进展,但仍未捕捉人类因果认知的关键特征,尤其在人类擅长的某些关键领域尚未带来突破。我们认为,‘人类生态位’中的因果问题——即社会性、自主性、目标驱动的代理在真实世界中感知与行动——与SCM所描述的因果关系有本质差异。例如,日常物品具有相似类型和因果属性,人类能通过因果类比快速将一类物体(如杯子)的知识迁移到另一类(如碗),而这类类比在SCM中表达困难。我们探讨这些因果能力如何适应并源于人类生存环境。通过更深入理解人类因果认知及其在生态位中的适应性,未来跨学科研究有望引入更具人类启发性的归纳偏置,推动更强大、可控且可解释的系统发展。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Humans interpret the world around them in terms of cause and effect and communicate their understanding of the world to each other in causal terms. These causal aspects of human cognition are thought to underlie humans' ability to generalize and learn efficiently in new domains, an area where current machine learning systems are weak. Building human-like causal competency into machine learning systems may facilitate the construction of effective and interpretable AI. Indeed, the machine learning community has been importing ideas on causality formalized by the Structural Causal Model (SCM) framework, which provides a rigorous formal language for many aspects of causality and has led to significant advances. However, the SCM framework fails to capture some salient aspects of human causal cognition and has likewise not yet led to advances in machine learning in certain critical areas where humans excel. We contend that the problem of causality in the ``human niche'' -- for a social, autonomous, and goal-driven agent sensing and acting in the world in which humans live -- is quite different from the kind of causality captured by SCMs. For example, everyday objects come in similar types that have similar causal properties, and so humans readily generalize knowledge of one type of object (cups) to another related type (bowls) by drawing causal analogies between objects with similar properties, but such analogies are at best awkward to express in SCMs. We explore how such causal capabilities are adaptive in, and motivated by, the human niche. By better appreciating properties of human causal cognition and, crucially, how those properties are adaptive in the niche in which humans live, we hope that future work at the intersection of machine learning and causality will leverage more human-like inductive biases to create more capable, controllable, and interpretable systems.

因果推理认知模型可解释AI类比学习

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